Accountability should end in performance, not pain

Here’s a question: How important is accountability to driving performance and achieving your business goals? If your answer is anywhere from “It’s absolutely mission-critical” to “It’s the only way to get there,” then we’re on the same wavelength. Here’s your next question: Where did you learn to practice accountability?

This is where things usually get a bit challenging. Many business leaders admit they’ve never formally learned how to practice accountability. They’ve gotten by on luck and application of what they have personally witnessed and lived through, and here we are. This points us in the direction of a real problem: What we’ve experienced when it comes to accountability is usually something that goes something like this:

• The trigger event for accountability is that something has gone wrong.
• Because something has gone wrong, when we practice accountability, someone gets blamed for what went wrong.

This approach is the opposite of what helps a team gel, get buy-in, and ultimately the one that drives performance. But we don’t know better because this is all we’ve experienced. And so we perpetuate the only system we know.

Interestingly, high-performance military teams practice accountability differently. As they recognise the importance of harnessing the humanness of human teams. They do so because the blame-and-shame approach doesn’t advance the human side of teams and know they must practice accountability always — regardless of the outcome.

Ultimately, they’ve found a better way to do so: They use accountability to learn as a team. And they do this because they understand the imperative to learn their way through disruption.

3 reasons why team-based accountability works

As business leaders navigating the Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) world of business, we must ask ourselves why we didn’t organically adopt the same approach. It would seem to make abundant sense for at least three clear reasons:

1. Employee engagement demands it

We live in a world with low employee engagement. Gallup consistently reports this, and it is increasingly advising us that employees are not only not engaged but actively disengaged (see their “State of the Global Workplace, 2024” report). In this world, employees seemingly don’t care whether we’re upset about their performance. As such, berating them for not doing their part isn’t going to move the needle… and it is actually the wrong approach.

How does Gallup recommend employers address this problem and work to achieve engagement? Simple. They advise that “Managers drive engagement through goal setting, regular feedback, and accountability.” But they also note that “a great manager builds an ongoing relationship with an employee grounded in respect, positivity, and an understanding of the employee’s unique gifts” (State of the Global Workplace, 2024).

In this sense, a version of accountability that builds up the employee is critical in overcoming the challenge of active disengagement and is essential in driving the performance we seek. The high-performance team approach builds up the team members as part of an approach centered on having a better day tomorrow.

2. It’s the easier way to do it

When our team asks business leaders how many of them avoid accountability out of fear of looking like the bad person in the room, hands always go up. It’s natural — so many leaders organically want to avoid conflict. And they’ll avoid it even if it means enabling underperformance.

These kinds of leaders will tolerate an above-average group doing average work to preserve perceived harmony. What they’re missing here, in addition to the lack of actual performance, is that this quest for nice-yet-average teams is a surefire recipe for losing high-performing teammates. And this is the case because performers — wait for it — want to win.

When, on the other hand, accountability is practiced as a means of team learning, there is no “bad” person in the room. It’s simply a room full of people who, as a consequence of being able to be vulnerable, admit to their own deficiencies to learn how to have a better experience the next time.

The focus isn’t on looking backward and blaming anyone — the approach most often practiced in business. Instead, it is on looking forward and figuring out how to have a better experience next time. This attribute makes the high-performance team approach to accountability the right approach for today.

3. It’s also the most effective way there is

When we ask leaders, “How does accountability work on your team?” the answer is often something like “shockingly bad.” Leaders acknowledge that it often doesn’t happen in the first place. When it does, it’s often unevenly practiced and frequently leads to defensiveness. So many leaders have confessed that their accountability practices lead to excuses, justifications, finger-pointing and blame. It’s no surprise that people don’t want to go through this.

The high-performance team approach is different. It not only drives performance, it drives it in droves. Two researchers, Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli, came across the high-performance team accountability model — something these teams call a “Post-Mission Debrief” — and ran a meta-analysis to study its effectiveness. They concluded that individuals and teams that debrief correctly see about a 20-25% performance boost from it (Tannenbaum & Cerasoli, 2013). We’ll often ask business leaders, “How effective is your accountability practice?” And whatever they say, we ask them to compare it to what the Debrief can offer. There is no question that the debrief comes out on top.

And why is it that a high-performance military team approach to accountability would be so effective? Here are three quick reasons:

1. Military teams happen to be extremely human in their approaches, and the Debrief, when done correctly, is an incredibly human way to practice accountability;
2. High-performance military teams have the discipline to practice it ritually and correctly; and
3. These teams can’t afford to lose in a disruptive battlespace. As such, they have to learn quickly, from mission to mission, to win

Business teams have much to learn from high-performance military teams. Arguably, the most important thing to focus on would be harnessing accountability as a means of learning through disruption, to have a better day tomorrow, no matter what happened today. So be bold, learn how to debrief correctly and give it a try!

Author: Robert Teschner. This first appeared in the Vistage Research Centre.